Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  A half-mile away, hanging over the open sea, one of the choppers exploded, and the helicopter that was hovering over their own group held still for a moment, then tilted hard to the right and set off to give aid to their fellow warriors.

  Sugarman and Janey raced the last short distance to the plane and Thorn saw his friend clutch the base of the ladder mounted on one of the wing floats. He reached down and hauled Janey out of the water and then put out his hand for Kirk Graham.

  As Thorn swam on, watching the others board the plane, he felt a flutter against his thighs and belly. Like the whoosh of some startled sea creature flushed from its hole by splashing swimmers. He ducked his head and peered into the transparent blue.

  Just beneath him, a little more than a body’s length away, he saw the billowing trail of gray hair passing below him, like a silver cape undulating through heavy current.

  And then the naked white body of Vic Joy frog-kicking through the water. At that moment Vic turned his head, looking above him, and his eyes met Thorn’s, holding still for a half-second in that silent column of water between them. A cloud of bright bubbles exploded from Vic’s lips, and then with a hard scissor-kick he shot toward Thorn, the blade in his right hand.

  Thorn sucked down a breath and plunged his head into the water, thrashing his feet and digging his arms.

  Driven upward by the buoyancy and his savage kick, Vic rocketed past him to the surface. He took a deep gulp of air and swiveled and smashed the knife into the water, a bright arc flashing by the spot where Thorn’s face had been only a second before. Thorn snatched at Vic’s wrist but got only a handful of foam.

  For a moment Vic floated on his belly, pressing his face below the surface, tracking Thorn’s movements. Thorn backstroked out of range and surfaced ten feet away. The others were climbing aboard the plane. Only Alex had stayed behind and was treading water five yards away.

  “Go on, Alex! Go to the plane. I’ll be there. Go!”

  With a wild swing Vic lunged toward Thorn, but his knife hand splashed a yard away. He sputtered and choked and surged up from the water and slashed at Thorn again, plunging the blade into the water closer this time, but still a foot or two out of range.

  Thorn could keep this up indefinitely, floundering backward, wearing Vic out. He chanced a quick look past Vic at the battle in the distance. Hard to tell who was winning, but three helicopters were still scattered above the yachts and he could hear the faint retorts of gunfire.

  “You worthless prick.” Vic inched closer through the calm sea. Knife out of sight. “I’m taking your balls and putting them in a jar.”

  “Come on, Vic. Enough talk.”

  “You’re destroyed, Thorn. You and your fucking friends. This is the end.”

  Vic treaded water, closing the gap between them.

  “Some pirate you are, Vic. Cowering in your room the night your parents bought it. I bet you’re still in there, aren’t you? Dark, claustrophobic. How about it, buccaneer? You still in there, sucking on your thumb?”

  Vic lunged, and Thorn wallowed backward beyond his reach, but this time Vic didn’t swipe his knife. The thrust was a ruse, for in the next second he splashed to his left toward Alexandra and was suddenly stretched out and swimming hard and fast, catching her unawares.

  She pivoted and fell forward into an efficient stroke, getting her feet moving, headed toward the plane, but not fast enough. By then Vic was almost on her, slicing through the water at an awesome clip. Thorn took the shortest angle and in four strokes Vic’s feet were slapping inches from his face.

  But Alexandra must have sensed Vic closing in, because she halted and turned on him. Thorn lifted his head from the water in time to see Vic slash the blade at her throat. Her hand shot up to block it.

  In their quiet months together, Thorn had forgotten her skills in martial arts, years of karate training. Forgotten her hair-trigger reflexes, how calm she was, how focused. She met Vic’s strike with a vicious chop to his wrist and the knife popped loose and splashed a few feet to his right. Alex aimed a backhanded punch at his chin but clipped him only lightly as Vic flopped backward away from her, then disappeared below the surface.

  Thorn heaved forward and swiped at the man’s right ankle but was a second late. Vic was thrashing toward the knife that lay in the sand a few feet from the patch of elkhorn coral.

  “Don’t, Thorn!” Alexandra shouted. “There’s no time. Now, come on.”

  “It has to be done, Alex. No choice.”

  Thorn drew a breath and tucked into the water.

  Fifteen feet below, Vic fumbled with the knife and lost it in the sand, kicking his feet wildly against the buoyancy.

  Thorn came from overhead, grabbed a handful of Vic’s hair, and wrenched him to the side. Seizing one of the razory stalks of elkhorn coral near its thick base, Thorn levered Vic a half-foot out of the range of the knife. But he twisted and lurched, scrabbling in the sand, then he flailed his arm backward, the glint of the blade flashing inches from Thorn’s face.

  Thorn’s hand was shredding against the spiny coral, blood clouding the water. But he held on and rattled Vic’s head from side to side. A stream of bubbles broke from Vic’s mouth, and he twisted hard against Thorn’s hold and swiped the blade at his arm, missed, but gouged his chest instead, leaving a burning track through the bands of muscle and flesh. A single plume of blood floated upward in a filmy spiral. The impact of the blade against Thorn’s chest knocked the knife loose. Tumbling from Vic’s hand, it disappeared into a swirl of sand.

  Thorn’s left arm was deadened, but he kept his fingers knotted to Vic’s hair and the other hand clutching to the trunk of coral. A sudden drowsy warmth seem to permeate the water as the airless compression of the sea tightened around Thorn’s chest. He’d been holding his breath for half a minute and now every tick dimmed the light in his head and pumped his chest full of burning pressure.

  Vic Joy thrashed against Thorn’s grip. But couldn’t break free. Thorn’s hand was locked deep into the heavy snarls of hair. The equation forming in his head crowded out all doubt, all rational thought; even the growing throb in his chest eased. He was calmer than he’d been in years. Clear-sighted. Certain.

  This wasn’t about justice or right and wrong. The sharp tang of revenge played no part in it, either. It was simpler than any of that. This man was a danger to every person Thorn loved, and if it took Thorn’s own death to cancel out Vic Joy, then it was a fair exchange. Some small karmic payback for the suffering Thorn had caused over the years in his own selfish pursuits.

  He held on beyond endurance. All about him a crimson mist was suspended in the still sea. His vision darkened and black spots danced inside his eyes. The oxygen in his lungs was failing, but he couldn’t let go. In a groggy moment he considered inhaling seawater and staying behind with Vic, the two of them knotted forever on the sandy floor. A fitting conclusion to Thorn’s wayward, fucked-up journey.

  At that moment he tilted his head and looked upward at the spangled surface of the sea. Thousands of light-years away, Alexandra Collins was floating facedown, watching him, waving her arm in ghostly slow motion, urging to him to come on, come on.

  Vic’s struggling slowed and finally ceased. Thorn yanked Vic’s head backward and watched his face as a string of small bubbles escaped Vic’s lips like words too small to capture meaning. His body went slack and his kicking died away.

  Up on the surface Alexandra watched Thorn hold on for a few seconds more, then release the corpse. He let the water lift him, and with his last flicker of resolve he held his breath those dozen feet until he broke through to the air.

  When Thorn opened his eyes, Kirk Graham was behind the controls. The plane was taxiing across the blue shallows, then lifting up. Overloaded and clumsy until it was free of the drag of earth and began to soar. A mile or so to the east, the sea battle continued, one yacht on fire, another listing hard to its starboard, going down. The choppers winning. Air supremacy.

  Lawton rode
in the copilot seat. In the first row Sugarman and Janey were huddled together. Alex sat beside Thorn and pressed a wad of cloth hard to the rip in his chest. In the seconds before he fainted again, he watched the puppy trot down the aisle, oblivious to his injury, wagging his tail, spraying them all with flecks of his innocent blood.

  Thirty-Three

  “Thorn has been sleeping in that little tent?”

  “Sometimes in his boat,” Sugarman said. “Sometimes in the tent.”

  The pup tent Thorn had been using was so small, he couldn’t roll over without knocking it down.

  “Why’d they burn his house down?” Janey asked.

  “I don’t know why,” Sugarman said. “Whys are hard.”

  They worked for half an hour driving the pegs into the hard ground. The four-man safari tent had cost Sugarman six hundred dollars at Sears. Money he didn’t have, but what the hell? Mosquito netting across the door. Room inside for a cot, a camp table, a cooler. Sugar had bought a Coleman lantern, too, so Thorn could read after the sun set. See his way around at night if he couldn’t sleep.

  “Those Zeiss binoculars were nice,” Janey said. “But I like the one you gave me better.”

  Jackie was out on the dock, hurling rocks at the water. Chanting along with the rap music in her earphones.

  “Sorry they’re not nitrogen-purged.” Sugar hammered another peg into the stony soil.

  “Oh, they fog up a little, but that’s okay,” said Janey. “I like them. I saw a palm warbler a little while ago.”

  “Wagging its tail in the dirt,” Sugar said.

  “Yeah,” Janey said. She whacked a stake with the rubber mallet. Five whacks and it was in deep. A strong little girl. Damn strong. Amazingly strong. Stronger than he deserved.

  “Where’d Thorn go?”

  “He took a trip up north,” Sugar said.

  “The North Pole?”

  “Not that far, no.”

  “He’ll be surprised by the tent, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Sugarman said. “He’ll be surprised. He’ll love it.”

  “Thorn’s pretty cool.” She whacked another peg into the earth.

  “Yeah, he is,” Sugar said. “He’s a pretty cool guy.”

  “He sure gets in a lot of trouble, though.”

  “Yeah,” said Sugar. “But we should try not to hold that against him.”

  “I like him. I think he’s funny. Someday I want to marry him.” She sank another peg into the ground.

  Sugarman watched her work. His little girl. His flesh and blood. My God, she was strong.

  “No, it’s okay, we don’t mind, please come in.”

  Lawton had a folding spade in his hand. A green trenching tool from his army days. Alexandra and Thorn stood on the porch of the white clapboard house at 215 Oak Street in Columbus, Ohio.

  The couple who owned the house were named Prevost. Retired high school teachers, they said. Mrs. Prevost explained that she had a mother who, like Lawton, needed a little looking after. They understood, understood completely.

  “The dog okay?” Thorn said. “We can leave it in the rental car.”

  “The dog’s fine,” Mr. Prevost said. “We love dogs.”

  “Well, come in, come in,” Mrs. Prevost added.

  The Prevosts stood aside and without a word Lawton marched through the house and out the back door. The dog trotting behind.

  “Some coffee?” Mrs. Prevost said. “While we watch the excavation.”

  “Sure,” Alexandra said. “Thank you.”

  They sat in a sunny breakfast room with a bay window that looked out at the small backyard. Lawton was standing beneath a maple tree that was full of fresh leaves. He turned around and pressed his back to the trunk and took three paces toward the back of the lot.

  “We’ll clean up any mess he makes,” Alex said. “He’ll lose interest in a few minutes anyway, I’m sure.”

  “What happened to you?” Mrs. Prevost motioned at the sling on Thorn’s left arm. Immobilized for weeks while the throbbing sinews rejoined.

  “Swimming accident,” Thorn said.

  “Sharks?” Mr. Prevost said.

  “A lower life-form than that,” Thorn said.

  Mrs. Prevost was smiling out the bay window. She had gray hair that she wore loose and long. She looked a little like Thorn’s high school math teacher. Clearly a nice woman married to a nice man.

  “We knew the Morgans,” Mr. Prevost said. “We bought the house from them. But we didn’t know the owners before them.”

  “My father’s parents built this house,” Alexandra said.

  “It’s a nice house,” said Thorn.

  “Well, we’ve been very happy here,” Mrs. Prevost said. “Twenty years of marital bliss.” She smiled at her husband. She’d probably been a wonderful teacher.

  Lawton was digging now and the puppy caught on quickly and worked at the edge of the same hole, spitting dirt out between his hind legs. His tail was three or four inches shorter than it had been, but it didn’t seem to bother the dog. Just allowed him to wag it faster.

  “When I was a kid I buried a time capsule myself,” Mr. Prevost said. “But it was so long ago, I can’t remember where. I remember the house, but I’d never be able to find the spot again.”

  “I don’t think Dad remembers, either. But he’s been talking about it so much. We thought it was worth the trip.”

  “You’re from Florida?”

  “The Keys,” Thorn said. Then looked at Alex. “And Miami.”

  “Since we retired, we go to Disney World once a year,” Mrs. Prevost said. “I’m a sucker for all that stuff.”

  Lawton was coming toward the house. He was holding a glass jar.

  “I don’t believe it,” Thorn said.

  Lawton came into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “Too tough for me,” Lawton said, and handed the jar to Thorn.

  With his good hand, Thorn unscrewed the lid and handed it back.

  Lawton dumped the contents on the kitchen table. A skeleton key. A few coins. A red-and-green lanyard. And a photograph that had gone almost white. A picture of two boys, each holding long cane fishing poles. Both of them had blond hair cut in bangs, and the older boy was holding up what probably was a fish, although that part of the photograph had turned white.

  “That’s Charlie and me,” Lawton said. “Our first catch. Charlie’s dead. Died of cancer. Isn’t that right, Alex? Cancer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He died when he was young. But I just keep living on and on.”

  “We’re glad of that,” Alex said.

  “Charlie and I did everything together,” said Lawton. “Hell, we’d scrap like a couple of pit bulls sometimes, but look at us there. You’d never know we were anything but best buddies.”

  “You were cute,” Mrs. Prevost said. “Both of you.”

  “What kind of fish was that?” Mr. Prevost asked.

  “A marlin,” Lawton said. “Caught it in a pond that used to be right back there behind our yard.”

  “A marlin, Dad?”

  “Well, okay. It wasn’t a marlin. Some other fish, crappie probably. But it’s gone now. We ate it, me and Charlie. Fried it up for supper. First fish I ever caught.”

  “We’ll try to make sure it’s not the last,” Thorn said.

  Alexandra stood up from the table and thanked the two retired teachers.

  “You’ve been very kind,” she said. “We’ll go fill in the hole.”

  “No, no,” Mr. Prevost said. He was beaming. “I know what we should do, Millie, we should bury one of those things ourselves. Something for our old age.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling at her husband. “What a lovely idea.”

  Also by James W. Hall

  Blackwater Sound (2001)

  Rough Draft (2000)

  Body Language (1998)

  Red Sky at Night (1997)

  Buzz Cut (1996)

  Gone Wild (1995)

  Mean Hi
gh Tide (1994)

  Hard Aground (1993)

  Bones of Coral (1992)

  Tropical Freeze (1990)

  Under Cover of Daylight (1987)

  Hot Damn! (2001)

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Stephen Bell and Garry Kravit, who kept me flying straight and true. To Arthur Lane, who untangled the high-tech aspects. To Richard and Charlie for their unfailing editorial support, clarity, and great ideas. Deepest thanks to Vaughn Morrison, a man who is truly at home in the natural world and whose knowledge of birds and beasts and the sky above is a constant inspiration.

  OFF THE CHART. Copyright © 2003 by James W. Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hall, James W. (James Wilson).

  Off the chart: a novel / James W. Hall.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-0504-6

  1. Thorn (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Florida Keys (Fla.)—Fiction. 3. Central America—Fiction. 4. Policewomen—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A369O36 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2002191965